plus fifteen!

I’ve always thought this was a nice building.
Today we started out here at what’s called the “Barley Mill.” We didn’t go inside or anything… We went to Eau Claire Mall thinking that we’d walk over to the park and get some pictures of the river. And then we realized how cold it was. Walking in the mall we saw a sign that said that we could enter the +15 at the Sheraton, which is just across the way from the mall. So the lightbulbs in our heads went on and we started off on a trek through the hallways of the +15 (for those of you who don’t know what it is, the +15 is the world’s most extensive pedestrian skywalk system with a total length of 16 km (10 miles) and 59 bridges[1]. The system is so named because the skywalks are approximately 15 feet (4.6 metres) above street level.)  And it’s heated.

We ended up at the devonian gardens, a large indoor urban park, according to wikipedia and took lots of pictures in there too.

They even have a playground in there.  No swings though, so jonah was disappointed about that.  But he wasn’t disappointed when he saw the millions of kids running around, and the parents who were totally ignoring them.  I saw a kid standing on the highest pole in the world and just as he clapped his hands like julia roberts told peter pan to clap if he believed, this kid’s dad laid himself down on the bench, likely trying to recover his sorry butt from last night’s drinking binge.  Of course I have no idea what the guy’s real problem was, but when your kid is standing from tall heights, clapping his hands, not getting any attention from you, you have to hope you aren’t about to witness the worst accident in the history of devonian gardens.

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update from hawaii

So back in December Stacie tagged me. I’m supposed to reveal 5 things you didn’t know about me and I thought it would be totally easy, but I’ve been exposing myself online since 2001 and now that I’m trying to come up with five new things, I’m thinking that I’ve already overshared.
5 things you don’t know about me:

1. I’ve been visiting my family since before Christmas.
2. After over 30 years of inconsistent practice, I have just completed my fourth consecutive month of regular flossing.
3. I hate horror movies.
4. My google-fu is better than yours.
5. My mother and I are probably the only people alive who still watch 7th Heaven. And we’ve probably seen every episode.

And in accordance with my “thou shalt not tag others” policy, I will not ask anyone else to write on this topic.

In other news – Hawai`i is wonderful! I did not journal regularly the way I should have, so I don’t have any idea what we did each day, but I do need to sit down and write down *something*. Pictures to come.

Lastly, the videos. As I told my cousin, Lauren, I moved the videos to a secret /videos/ directory (we have such high security measures here…). I meant to tell you all here too. See, I moved the videos because when I was attempting to post them to youtube, they were taking FOREVER to play. So I figured if I just put them up somewhere and left it up to viewers to right click and save to their computers themselves, that everyone would be happy with videos that didn’t rely on internet connections to play properly. And then I came home to my parents house and realized that the only reason youtube was slow at home was because my computer is highly in need of upgrading. (Jim fixed that when he went home and I have a brand new computer which, thanks to the Office, I have named ‘updog’.) So the point of this rambly paragraph is that all videos can now be found on youtube.

I’m now off to work on getting photos posted.

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Today I didn’t even have to use my AK

No one actually remembers that song, do they?

We had a nice weekend here with the out of towner’s. They were only here for a couple of days, which is good. It didn’t turn into one of those “when are they going to leave” situations. In fact, since they showed up late Saturday night, it really didn’t seem like they were here very long at all.

We picked up a new tomato on Sunday. I’ll explain that in a couple of weeks I think.

After picking up the new tomato, Jim took the guests on a bike ride around the city. I stayed home because we initially didn’t have enough tomatoes to go around – we had enough for the guests, but mine would be loaned out. In the end we had enough if I wanted to go, but I decided to stay back and have some time to myself.

They were gone for a long long time. Sounds like they had lots of fun.

We cooked dinner, I made brownies, and we went to sleep. This morning our travelling friends packed up their stuff and drove off into the sunset. Except the sun wasn’t setting at 10:30 in the morning.

In other news, the dog is producing milk. She’s been “nesting” for a couple of weeks now, which, for whatever reason, we didn’t think was odd. But the milk production got us thinking… See, she recently decided that her new favorite spot was under the side table in the living room. It used to be under the dining room table, but I think that is too open for her. So she decides that the side table is where she wants to be and she starts to do the digging in the carpet thing there. Then we notice her digging all over the house. She digs before she lays down on her bed spot on the side of the bed. She digs when she lays down in front of the sliding door. We thought she just didn’t want to lay down on the floor mat. But now we see that it’s more than that.

She hasn’t been out of our sight. When she was in heat, we didn’t let her go anywhere unattended. We didn’t take her to the dog park until we knew she was finished being fertile.

But when we saw that there was actual milk involved, we became alarmed. Then jim remembered that growing up the farm, cows and horses have this thing they call a false pregnancy. And then I remembered my childhood dog, who wasn’t fixed for 1 or 2 heats, and her false pregnancies. Except we didn’t have a technical term for it, because I think I was like five. Tiffany would carry around a rubber squeaky toy. We called it her baby. Come to think of it, I think at one point she may have adopted my little farm fair teddy bear, baby boo. I so rock with the naming, no? New reports from mom say that she’d try to nurse the inanimate objects, just like the internet says. (I didn’t really believe that part until mom confirmed).

So my dog, missy. Jim and I are absolutely positive that she is still virginal and that no puppy miracles are taking place in this house. I think the udder (breast?) swelling may even be going down now.

Poor little girl.

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